


Old Admirals Who Feel The Wind

by Tammany



Series: The Sussex Downs [13]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Crossover, F/M, Gen, Good Omens-Sherlock mash-up, M/M, Mash-up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2019-08-27
Packaged: 2020-09-27 18:08:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20412085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: The title is from an Al Stewart song that fits the mood and tone of parts of this story, even if it's navy not army. Fortunately it exceeds its melancholy. Veterans are strong.This has hit another very good break point. Once again, I do not know if I will leave it to rest here, or go further. A lot of what I would want to see happen has happen, even if the smugglers have added nothing but fleeting humor to the narrative. But there are a couple more things I'd like to see happen, so--there's hope of a few more installments to come.Thank all of you who have commented, and discussed, and given such thought and care and attention to these posts. Thank you for loving what has been a largely improvisational pastiche of two series I love. And thank you for comments. Thank you so very much!Nota Bene: According to the cast list of The Abominable Bride, Janine's last name is Donlevy. Or not. But it's as close to an official listing as I know of.





	Old Admirals Who Feel The Wind

It was early morning, John’s third day at Mycroft and Sherlock’s. Sherlock and Mycroft’s?

It was a family estate, which already put it a thousand miles outside John Watson’s realm of familiarity. His family was aspiring-class straight through: just over blue collar, well below administrative or professional class. Even his own profession of “doctor” always seemed somehow to take second place to his core identities: soldier, adventurer, survivor. At heart he saw himself as a tough little squaddie with a drunk for a father, a drunk sister whose sexuality he did not really understand and seldom felt secure addressing (lesbian? queer? dyke? Who knew these days… It was all outside his own understanding regardless…). A veteran. Someone who got through on grit and suppression and a clear understanding of what kind of person he was trying to be: normal, class-humble, masculine proud. Capable. All the baggage packed away, all the angst thrown overboard, because that’s what you did.

He came from a realm far, far away from people with multiple family estates and trust funds and the ability to kill yourself on drugs using only the faint overflow of your remittance and rent prime real estate in London with only a superficial need for someone to help with the rent. So had it ever been, and so, in his opinion, would it ever be, world without end, amen.

Yet here he was, leaning against the rail of the terrace looking down from the main house to the paved path, to the cottage, to the public access, to the path to the shore, to the shore, to the ocean, to the horizon beyond…and for all he knew, to the ships to the Grey Havens, to the Isles of the West. It was a thing, he thought. Definitely a thing.

Here he was, with Rosie inside eating hot, homemade porridge prepared by Mycroft Holmes himself, drowned in warmed cream and honey “from the estate” and sliced peaches from the farmer’s market. Here he was, trying to figure out if there was a way, any way, to convince Sherlock and Mycroft to make a place for him here with his daughter, because once more he’d somehow succeeded in planting TNT, like Wiley Coyote, in a way that blew up his own life, rather than the Roadrunner’s. Job gone, relationship gone, home soon to be gone, starting over—again.

“Oooh, the long face.” The…demon. The demon’s voice was mocking, though not cruel. More like a fellow squaddie, or a sympathetic sergeant. The mocking of man to man. “Here—have a peach.”

“Thought you were in the business of apples.”

“Been there, done that, never even got a pint of cider after. Seriously—why the mope?”

“Considering my long history of being no fucking good at life, if you must know.”

“Ah. Got it.” The demon sounded substantially less sympathetic.

John risked a glance at the…being. “Where are your wings?”

“Packed away in the other dimension.”

“Which other dimension?”

“Wing dimension, I guess.”

John had the odd image of wings—millions of angel wings—floating around in faintly waving pairs, fanning softly, moving from here to there as they tracked the more corporeal bodies of their owners in some separate plane. He snorted. “Insane. All this—it’s insane. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear this was just unreal.”

The demon shot him a sly grin, and chuckled. “Word you want’s ‘ineffable.’ Learn it now. It comes in handy once you get in touch with the Realms.”

“Realms?”

“Whatever. Heaven. Hell. Earth-as-God’s. God Herself.”

“Herself?”

“Himself. Itself. Whatever it feels like being, whenever it feels like being it.”

John sighed heavily. “Like angels, then.”

“And demons.”

He grunted, trying to fight back the resentment.

“Problem?”

“I prefer a world where things stay still.”

The demon considered, snake eyes staring out over the upper line of his glasses, unsettling. After a time he said, with an empty voice. “No. No, you really don’t. The only worlds where things stay still are dead.” His voice said a lot about having witnessed quite a lot of “dead,” and having strong opinions of it.

He sounded like a veteran talking to a civilian. John found it…odd. Usually it was the other way around.

“How old are you?” he asked, trying to grapple with the very core idea that angels and demons were real. He was not a religious man, beyond prayers to God to be allowed to live. To allow other people to be alive…

The demon gave a supple, snaky shrug. “Since Earth was created, and before. Six thousand plus.”

“Plus?”

“Plus whatever came before She started time up locally. Hard to reckon ‘before time.’ It never matches up.”

“Riiiight.”

“Not me making the rules, sunshine.” He straightened and stretched, all long-leggity, skeleton-armed, serpentine combination of grace and awkwardness. He ran his fingers through long hair, still loose and tousled from sleep. “Got to get angel to do my braid for me,” he said—and John heard tenderness in his voice, expectation in his inflection.

He let that notion linger. He’d understood entirely the demon’s attraction to the merry, sexy woman he’d known as Angel. He had a harder time knowing what to say of the pudgy, soft man called Aziraphale. He didn’t understand.

“Doesn’t it matter to you?” The words burst out. “That she…he…changed?”

The demon paused and studied him from behind black glasses. At this angle they covered his eyes entirely, showing only the still, disciplined lines of a gaunt face, aquiline and elegant. After a moment he said, in stark tones, “I suppose that depends on what you mean by ‘does it matter.’”

“I just—I mean…” he trailed off, and said, in lost frustration. “I’m sorry. I’m not gay. I don’t understand. I never seem to get it.”

“So—the body matters to you? Not the spirit inside it?”

John scowled. “To love? No. It doesn’t matter. Or it shouldn’t. But for desire? Of course it matters. It’s not…normal. For women to love women. For men to love men.”  
  
[Note: I am having John use "normal" in a very restrictive sense of statistical average/normal behavior, and in the context of John showing strong signs of wanting himself to be a very "normal" man, in terms of being ordinary and average. Yes, he's also go pride and a desire for excellence: but he's aspirationally inclined to want to match an idealized "Ordinary man with ordinary wife, living ordinary life." As indicated in Series 04, he doesn't actually enjoy it much when he achieves it--but it's still his unspoken goal. He is not using it in the pejorative sense of LGBTQ being undesirable, unnatural, or freakish. Just statistically far from the norm. However, some of his assumptions are disturbing and less flattering...]

The demon snorted. “Been happening since there were enough samples of both to have the occasional odd-aligned person. Perfectly normal. She’s been creating them, male and female, in her own morphing, imageless image since the beginning, sunshine. Comes with the template.”

John closed his eyes. “It may be normal for some people to want it. It’s not normal for human culture to be all right with them actually doing it, though. It’s a discipline thing. You’re not just your body—you’re how you behave in that body. It’s…a way of living. A pattern of building a society. It’s not just what your body wants, it’s what your soul understands is right.”

The demon studied him, then shrugged in highly melodramatic denial of understanding—very European, very worldly. “I’m a demon, me. Far be it for me to say what’s right. For all you know, I’m trying to tempt you, eh? Demons do that. Sssssoooooooo—“ he gave an evil, toothy grin, and caroled, “Angel! Hey, Angel, the doctor here had a question.”

“Commmming,” Aziraphale sang out from within the big house. Moments later he trotted along, resplendent in a Victorian men’s boating outfit: striped blue and white jacket, white shirt and trousers, white canvas brogues, a cotton web belt, a plaid bow-tie that matched his jacket perfectly in color, if not in print, and a straw boater hat trimmed with a blue and white striped ribbon. He carried a bamboo cane, and radiated absolute delight with his ensemble. “Yes, doctor?”

“Doctor’s tryin’ to figure out what an angel has to say about gender changing.”

Oh, dear, John thought. If the demon were a snake, he suspected he’d be a rattlesnake. There was something of a warning shiver in his voice that spoke of rattles vibrating. He had only heard that note from Mycroft previously…And Sherlock in a true rage.

“I didn’t mean…” He clenched his teeth. How did this always go so wrong for him? “I was just saying I don’t feel… I’d have a hard time…” He huffed. “I. Am. Not. Gay.”

The man—a man who’d been a sexy little honeypot just a day ago—blinked at him in confused good will. “No? I mean—no. You don’t have to be. Though—it’s rather hard to understand as an angel. For us it’s always…performative. Aspirational. Being neither, having the option of being any and all… It’s very hard to understand how humans experience it.”

“Some things are supposed to be stable.”

“Why? Only death is stable.”

John scowled. “It just—“

The angel straightened, as though surprised by an unexpected possibility. “Oh, I’m sorry. Is my new body upsetting you? But—it’s my usual. I’m hardly _ever _Angel. Crowley’s much more likely to be his—her—its female corporeal self.”

“He only did it for me,” the demon added, with malicious humor damped down to perfect deadpan. “The devil made him do it.”

“Crowley—don’t bait the poor man! It’s not his fault he’s limited! So short a life and so pitifully human a set of cultural norms.”

Which was not an attitude John had ever heard expressed quite that casually condescending way, even by his sister Harry and her wife.

He shook his head. “Never mind. I just—Yeah. Ok. I’m conditioned wrong. But I am, and, yes, I find it a bit weird.”

The angel patted him gently on the shoulder. “Shhh. There-there. Never mind. We find you a bit weird, too, but that’s not a problem. Everybody’s weird, after all.”

“Um…” He sighed heavily. Life. What was a man to do? “Just a simple soldier,” he said. “Sorry. I tolerate. But I don’t always understand.”

The angel smiled radiantly, and patted him again, this time more vigorously. “There, now! Three of us, veterans together! Isn’t that nice!”

“Not ‘nice,’ angel,” the demon said, wickedly. “Butch.”

“Butch?” The angel frowned. “But—Michael? She's a veteran. And—Uriel. She was in the first battle. And Beelzebub. She and Dagon. And…”

“Human culture,” the demon said, with transparently false innocence.

“But—“

“Oh, shut up,” John snapped. “I get it, all right? Women can be veterans.”

“Women were usually tougher than veterans,” the demon drawled. “They were ‘surviving civilians.’ An entirely different intensity of ‘bad-ass.’”

“Language, dear,” the angel said.

“Oh. Right. ‘Motherfucking tough-ass bitches.’ Is that closer, Angel? To describe women who raise children in war, survive rape—and help their children survive rape—endure the murder of their children and rise up and start over again? Who find ways to turn grass into soup? Eat bugs? Collect dew in cups? Who heal each other and their soldiers from illness and injury and despair?” His voice crackled with anger.

The angel met his eyes. “Crowley,” he said quietly, “I’ll grant you that humans usually accomplished war perfectly well without your lot or mine provoking them. More often than not humans just blamed us for what they managed perfectly well themselves. But both our sides tempted them—in the name of Heaven and of Hell. And we seldom tried to stop them without there being something worse in the wings.”

The demon bridled, anger quivering in every bone. He met the angel’s eyes, and in that second John felt entirely outside their interaction. But, for the first time, he felt entirely inside it—a veteran watching the broken, bleeding, healing, hoping interaction of two men who’d experienced wars together. Soldiers in the same fields, coming bloody from the same battles.

The demon broke the contact first, turning away with a grunt—and the angel left John and went to stand by his lover, leaning on his bamboo cane, arm and shoulder and hip just brushing against his friend’s.

And in that moment, John was able to integrate it, for one fleeing moment: Angel and demon, man and man, veteran and veteran, friend and friend—lover and lover. Old marrieds. Comrades. Soul mates.

“Let’s go down and swim,” the angel said. “The beach is clear today, and the sun is just rising high enough.”

“Not the pool, angel?” The demon leaned lightly against his beloved, before breaking contact.

“No. I think I want to feel Her ocean this morning, dear.”

“As you like it,” the demon said, a smile in his voice—and he snapped his fingers and suddenly they were both in Victorian swim suits, his own jet black and rather macho, his companions blue and white striped and begging for someone to call him “sissy-boy.” Both looked perfectly at ease.

“Have a good swim, then,” John said, and watched as they sloped down the path to the sea, contented in themselves and their world.

It was a weird world, he thought. A funny old world. And, yet, he felt more at ease with it now than he had in a long time.

He went in and found Mycroft, Greg, Rosie, Sherlock and Janine all gathered in the big, comfortable kitchen, eating a range of foods.

“Good morning, John,” Mycroft said, with a smile that seemed more sincere than his smiles often were, in John’s experience. “What are your plans for the day?”

“Not sure,” John admitted. “I have to decide what comes next, and…” he sighed, and poured himself a big cup of black tea. “I’ll admit, it’s rough to have to figure out how to start over again.”

“You’ll have a place to live no matter what,” Sherlock said, and gave his older brother a fierce look. “Won’t he, Mikey?” The nickname was saw-edged.

Mycroft rolled his eyes, and gave a melodramatic sigh. “Why, yes, Sherlock. Whatever you say, Sherlock. More seriously, John, we do have multiple properties in the family. Even some more out here. Our ancestors have always been quite traditional about land. We can always find somewhere to put you and Rosie up if you need it. That ought to free you up to decide what you want to do without concern for where you can find to do it.”

John considered refusing, on principles—so many principles. A man didn’t accept charity; a man earned his own way; a man didn’t let someone like Mycroft trap him in a life-debt…

He could hear the angel and the demon, as though they sat on his two shoulders, debating the logic of human pride, just as they’d debated human sexual binaries. He had a feeling they’d have little patience with his principles… So he smiled, a bit tightly, and said, “Thank you, Mycroft,” and meant it. Even with a bit of annoyance still buried underneath.

“The local hospital is pretty well staffed right now,” Sherlock said. “But their EMT team could use someone with trauma experience and a medical license.”

The suggestion hovered between them all…

John considered it. He’d never wanted to sign up for trauma work, not since Afghanistan. But it was what he was good at. And the kind of paramilitary culture of an EMT was closer to the army than all those empty-feeling private practices he’d taken part in over the decades since he’d been invalided out…

“It’s an idea,” he said, warily. “I suppose I can apply, though.”

“Good,” Sherlock said, arm linked through Janine’s elbow, fingers gently playing with hers on the countertop. He met John’s gaze—a clear, unstained, simple contact, barely touched by their mixed griefs and angers and guilts. “If you stay here, we’ll find someplace near for you and Rosie. Form the Holmes-Lestrade-Watson compound.”

“Holmes-Lestrade-Watson-Celestial compound,” Janine corrected.

Sherlock turned and looked at her, and said, his voice only slightly tense, “Holmes-Lestrade-Watson-Celestial-Holmes-Donlevy compound.”

She looked at him, her eyes still—so still. She smiled, suddenly, as wry and amused and tart as the demon, and said, softly, “We’ll take up the discussion of double-shotgun hyphenated names later, love. But—yes. If you’re asking. Yes…”

And John, watching, studied their faces—and felt the room ring with a faint, faint echo of two old marrieds mere minutes before. With mixed feelings he would never quite come to terms with, he thought to himself that they seemed right. And he told himself he wasn’t losing a friend, but gaining a sister-in-law of sorts.

And as the table broke into gleeful chatter and congratulations, he and Sherlock exchanged glances.

Sherlock winked….

And John laughed, and laughed, and laughed.


End file.
